John Henry Nicholson (1838 – 1923) was a British-born, Queensland man of letters, teacher, writer and poet. Life John Henry Nicholson was born into a distinguished family of literary and scientific note, at Lyme Regis, Dorset, England on 12 June 1838. He was the eldest son of Anne Elizabeth Waring and John Nicholson (1809–1886). His mother Anne was the daughter of Captain Henry Waring, R.N. of Lyme Regis, Dorset. Her brother, Nicholson's uncle, John Burley Waring, was an architect, painter and intellectual. Nicholson's father was a distinguished biblical scholar and orientalist, who had studied at Oxford and in Germany, and in 1836 had published a grammar of the Hebrew language of the Old Testament. Nicholson's grandfather was the Rev Mark Nicholson (1770-1838), Fellow of Queen's College Oxford and long term President of Codrington College, Barbados. John Nicholson and his brother, Dr William Alleyne Nicholson, had befriended Ludwig Leichhardt, who they had met at the University of Göttingen. This connection ultimately led to the Nicholson family sponsoring Leichhardt's journey to Australia, by giving him £200, making his journeys of exploration possible. One of Nicholson's younger brothers was the famous palaeontologist, Henry Alleyne Nicholson (1844-1889) who became the Regius Professor of Natural History at Aberdeen University, and also held chairs in the main universities of Canada, Ireland and England. A sister, Annie Elizabeth Nicholson, was the biographer of Jane Welsh Carlyle. Nicholson said of himself that he had inherited his taste for linguistic studies from his father, his love for art and propensity to mysticism from his uncle, and he shared with his brother his proclivities for chemistry and botany and other real sciences and literary inclinations with the whole family. NIcholson was educated privately and also attended the Croft House Academy for boys, Brampton, Cumberland, where he developed an abiding love of German under the tutelage of the distinguished writer, Eugen Oswald. He emigrated to New South Wales in 1854 at the age of 16. After a brief trip to England in 1859, Nicholson returned to the newly-independent state of Queensland at the end of that year, and married German-born Anna Wagner, the following year. In 1860 he also opened a private school at Toowoomba, and in 1863 had a school at Warwick. He joined the Queensland education department in May 1865 as an assistant teacher. He resigned in 1868 in order to visit England, rejoined the department in June 1869,